Daily Reviews Summary 07/20/07

Thermalright has earned their legendary status in the cooling arena and with the V2, they have proven once again that they mean business. Not only is this heatsink the picture of quality and precision but it works very well without a fan when paired with cards that produce moderate amounts of heat. On the other hand, when using a passive cooler such as this one it becomes apparent just how much heat the 8600GTS cards produce.

It is hard to review a computer case and only find one thing about it you did not like, but that is exactly what happened to use when we reviewed the new Cooler Master Cosmos 1000. You will have to read the review to find out what the one dislike was.

Here is what Cooler Master has to say about their newest enclosure. ""In 2007, Cooler Master created COSMOS, a serene spirit within a luxurious, high-performance body. Each line of COSMOS is born with elegant heritage originated from devotion to prudence and innovation. It is captivating to know such power is enclosed behind the silence.

All in all, the installation of the Logisys cooler was a bit tedious and a bit messy with the thermal grease. The memory modules had really frustrating adhesive tape and two of them actually fell off! This was due to the fact that I was touching them too much to get the adhesive tape off. Lucky for us this happened before installation of the video card. This could have easily caused a short if the heatsink had landed on something that was carrying current.

The videocard itself was plain jane, but it's Sigma-Gate overclocking software was very unique. Arguably the most versatile videocard overclocking utility from a vendor, Biostar's Sigma-Gate and V-Ranger software allowed us to push that videocard to its max. Literally. The key to our overclocking Zen was adjustable GPU and memory voltage options. Sadly, Biostar's V-Ranger software only works with its Sigma-Gate videocards. Don't forget to check out the maximum videocard overclocking chart at the end, it's got to be the coolest page on the web!

ASRock has been gaining recognition in the motherboard market with quality budget boards that are very stable. A few months back, I reviewed the ASRock ALiveNF6G-DVI which had some decent overclocking ability to it. This time around, I'm going to be reviewing the AliveNF5-eSATA2+ which uses the nForce520 chipset. The motherboard supports the AM2 line of AMD processors from FX, X2, 64, and Sempron, and supports overclocking. Printed right on the motherboard is Dual Core CPU and Dual Channel DDR2-800. Some of the other features will be gone over in the review, so sit back and enjoy the ride.

Abit AN-M2 is a socket AM2 motherboard with on-board video based on GeForce 7025-630a chipset from nVidia, competing directly in both price and functionalities with motherboards based on AMD 690V and AMD 690G, thus targeted to digital entertainment PCs. Let’s take a look on the performance and features of Abit AN-M2.

Reading your favorite sites or keeping track of topics through RSS is one of the best ways to optimize your online reading. Not only will reading through RSS save time by not having to visit sites but you will no longer need an extensive bookmark list, there will be less loading time, and you won't have to sort through as many advertisements. Even so, RSS has problems of it's own. There are a lot of potential issues, but a big one is how easy it is to add more feeds. This is not a problem in and of itself, but you can easily overwhelm yourself simply by trying to consume too much. Another problem is that it becomes a constant flow of information to you so by the time you what originally intended to new posts are popping up and you can get stuck reading for extended periods of time.

OC Mod Shop posted a new guide: How to Speed Up Your PC by Removing Windows Services

There are lots of little programs used by the Windows operating system that take up memory, waste disk space and CPU clock cycles. These programs are called "services" and include all kinds of things such as UPS support, Netmeeting, QoS packet scheduler, telnet, themes, and alot of other obscure things that the average user doesn't need.

3D Game Man posted a review on the PC Power Cooling Silencer 750W Quad PSU

With 20 years of experience building power supplies for the consumer and industry, it's no wonder PC Power Cooling is THE preferred power supply. I personally have two S75Q models in two of my computer systems and have no issues whatsoever. So I really know first hand over an extended test period how excellent the Silencer model really is. The PC Power Cooling Silencer 750W Quad CrossFire Edition Power Supply (S75CF) is really the same as the previous model (S75Q), except it has two 8pin (6+2) PCIE leads and its red. This model is also ATI CrossFire certified, so it's perfect for an ATI CrossFire Video Card setup. This Power Supply fits the bill and ATI color theme! Watch the video to find out more and check out the bloopers at the end.

While the HD-DVD initially seemed to be the winner, things look a lot different nowadays. Just like in box matches, Blu-ray pushed its opponent in the corner and started to inflict hit after hit. Today we're looking at LaCie's d2 Blu-ray drive that brings writing to Blu-ray discs on PC platform. Is it time to upgrade?

There are many companies that exist for the sole purpose of helping your PC keep it's cool, but Noctua believes they do that better than anyone. So, we are putting their 80mm fan, 120mm fan and chipset cooler to the test, to see if they live up to the hype.

DragonSteelMods posted a review on the Duckling LED Bath Lights from Gizgeek

Today for review I have something a bit off the norm, but it's a gadget nonetheless. Working with companies for reviews can have the benefit of requesting products that you really want for review, or you can request other products not for yourself, like the Duckling Bath Lights I have for review today, I requested these for my youngest son who loves ducks, and loves to play in the tub. I thought the Duckling Bath Lights from Gizgeek would be perfect for him, and well we can proclaim it was 'kid tested'. They are a really cool toy though, they have touch sensors on them that activate the LEDs inside the ducks...

Planar offers the very competitive PX2611W - a 26 inch widescreen LCD monitor that is ideal for most PC's, including web browsing, photography work, and especially gaming. It features a 1920x1200 WUXGA native resolution with 8 bits of color per pixel (as opposed to six), has DVI-D with HDCP and analog VGA inputs, a wide color gamut, and is using the same internal LCD panel as the high-end NEC 2690WUXi. Benchmark Reviews will analyze the quality and value behind the Planar PX2611W 26-Inch Widescreen LCD Monitor.

The market for external storage has really started to heat up over the last couple of years. As greater capacities are becoming commonplace, people are finding even more stuff to store. As I have written in the past, the more space a person has, the more they will find to store in it, in the real world as well as the digital one. Some people can buy that 500 GB, 750 or 1 TB drive and slap it in their computer, but others want more complicated solutions. And the more you have to store, the more you have to lose. It is this increased awareness of data protection as well as storage needs which have given the NAS (network attached storage) market a boost. Light years ahead of the external hard drive, network attached storage brings with it a huge feature set, from remote accessibility, to automatic backups, and hardware failsafe systems. What is even more amazing is that these feats don't require a second mortgage. Today's NAS contender is the Cube Station CS407 NAS, from a newer company (founded in 2000) called Synology.

At the top of the ram we have the gap for the activity lights in two rows, these are really just for appearance but as I mentioned earlier those buying these sticks over the regular Ballistix will be purchasing them because of this. Let us move on and see how they fair up in the performance stakes shall we.

Howtoforge published a new howto: Virtual Hosting With PureFTPd And MySQL On Mandriva 2007 Spring

This document describes how to install a PureFTPd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine. In addition to that I will show the use of quota and upload/download bandwidth limits with this setup. Passwords will be stored encrypted as MD5 strings in the database.

Cooler Master has definitely made it easy to get into watercooling with the Aquagate S1. With everything ready to go out of the box, it's as easy to install as a typical air cooled heatsink and still manages to keep an overclocked processor cool. The small water pump is quiet and the radiator fan is adjustable so noise levels can be lowered when the computer is idle. For those with windowed cases, the system will be a nice looking addition with its blue LED fan and transparent tubing with blue coolant.